Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c44.s3: § 12. Battle of Mertā; first stage
Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c44.s3
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§ 12. Battle of Mertā; first stage
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On Friday the 10th of September, 1790 De Boigne silently marshalled his line of battle about two hours before daybreak and delivered his attack on the extreme left of the Rajput lines, at the first streak of dawn. Here the tanks of Dāngāwās were held by a body of fighting monks called Nāgās, who belonged to the Rāmānandi and Vishnuswāmi sects. Their arms were mostly sword and spear with a few rusty old matchlocks and 25 very old cannon.
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De Boigne's 12 battalions formed two lines with 50 pieces of light field guns before them. Some distance behind them the Maratha horse was drawn up, in a far elongated line, Lakhwā Dādā on the left, Gopāl Bhāu in the centre and Jivā Dādā on the right. A full mile behind these stood the small sulky contingents of Holkar's horse under Bāpu Rao and Kāshi Rao Holkar and Ali Bahādur's men under his diwan, Balwant Sadāshiv Aswālkar.
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Moving obliquely to their right, the trained battalions came upon the enemy and opened fire with grape on the Nāgā lines all of a sudden. The surprise was complete; the Nāgās were utterly unprepared; many of them had dispersed to the fields for the necessary operations of nature after the night's sleep, some were brushing their teeth with chewed twigs, some bathing in the tanks, and some still in bed. For some time the Rajput guns replied but without stopping De Boigne’s advance, who shot down the Nāgās running about and trying to assemble for combat. Nothing could stand before such superior firing at close range. The Nāgā lines were forced and their artillery captured in an hour’s time.
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Then the tide of battle suddenly turned and an unforeseen disaster threatened the victors. Captain Rohan, who commanded the three battalions forming De Boigne’s right wing, flushed with his easy victory and tempted by the rich camp of the Nāgās lying close ahead, advanced too far to the right without his general’s orders, and thus created a wide gap between his men and the rest of De Boigne’s line. Into this opening the Rathor cavalry poured with lightning speed and overwhelming numbers.
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For, by this time the alarm had spread throughout the Rajput army, where the chiefs were even more unready than the Nāgās. But a race of brave men cannot perish in utter inaction even through the folly of its leaders. Many individual heads of families gathered their relatives together and got ready to do and die on their personal initiative, though their supreme commander (Bakhshi) Bhimrāj Singhavi had at first vacillated and at last fled away. Therefore, when an hour after dawn, the three battalions under Rohan were seen to have moved far away from their centre, one large body of Rathor cavalry from the south of Dāngāwās quickly seized this tactical blunder, rushed into the gap in the campoo line, enveloped these battalions, cut up nearly half of the men, and threw the entire wing into disorder, though after the flood of horsemen had passed on, Rohan managed to rejoin De Boigne’s main body with the remnant of his force, himself mortally wounded.
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Taking advantage of this confusion and check to the Maratha side, the full force of the Rathor cavalry, forming seven large bodies, charged Sindhia’s army at the gallop. Regardless of their losses from the first salvoes of grape from De Boigne’s fifty guns, the Rathor horse swept tumultuously through the line of these guns, sabred such of the gunners as stood in their way, made a mere threat of attack against the front of the battalions and quickly wheeled to the right and the left in order to strike at the flanks of the campoo in two pincer movements, and overwhelm Sindhia’s cavalry in the second line. At the first impact of the whirlwind of Rathor cavalry the Deccani horse standing in three huge divisions at the back of the campoo was shaken, for the cry had gone up that the trained infantry was broken (*campoo barbād zahālā*). The Rajput cavalry whirled round the two wings and rear of De Boigne’s force seeking an opening for crumpling it up and riding down the foot. But what they found facing them everywhere was not the uncovered flank of a line formation but a square.
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The genius of De Boigne and the perfect discipline of his troops saved the day. As soon as the General saw his right wing engulfed by one body of Rathor cavalry and another body, heaving and roaring like a mile-long wave, getting ready before their camp to hurl themselves upon his own command, he at once drew his first line of infantry back on its supports and ordered the whole to form a hollow square, every face of which presented to the massed cavalry approaching it, a line of bristling bayonets and the platoon fire of musketry from rapid flintlocks. As time passed, the checked Rajputs continued to fall in heaps all over the plain.
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Unable to break the square of the campoo, the Rajput cavalry turned aside and struck the Maratha horse ranged behind. The Deccanis who had been long stationary, could not resist the momentum of the Rathor charge and fled far away to the rear. The whole body of Rajput assailants now wheeled to their own left and poured in a resistless flood on Gopāl Bhāu (Centre) and Jivvā Dādā (Right), who were swept off their posts and did not draw rein till they had got behind the stationary squadrons of Holkar and Ali Bahādur, a mile or more to the rear. Here some confused hand to hand fighting took place. And then, after two hours of such breathless exertion, the fury of the Rathor onslaught was spent, their horses and men were quite blown, their ranks were woefully thinned by the incessant fire of the campoo behind them; so, when the fresh horsemen of Holkar and Ali Bahādur boldly faced the enemy coming against them, and backed by such of Sindhia’s troopers as could be rallied, fell pellmell upon the crowd of Rathor cavalry on the Maratha right wing, they pushed them back.
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After failing to break the trained infantry, failing to annihilate the southern cavalry, the baffled Rathors turned their faces to their own lines, being helplessly butchered during the return journey by the campoo artillery firing on their flank and rear. For, in the meantime, at the first respite in the attack upon his infantry, De Boigne had personally advanced and reoccupied his fifty guns, and now plied them under his own eyes upon the enemy. His quick volleys of grape tore bloody lanes among the confused mass of tired men and horses retiring westwards.
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§ 13. Death-ride of the Saffron-clad Rajput desperadoes,—massacre of the Rathors.
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But the battle was not yet over. There was fighting still left in the Rathors. The last desperate charge for which they had long prepared, had still to be delivered. Rajputs who vow to fight to their last breath and never to leave the field except with victory, are invested by their kings with a full suit of robes dyed in saffron,—the colour put on by the Hindu bride-groom when he goes forth to his bridal bed. Such fighters were called Kesariā, i.e., saffron-clad, and in Hindustani, zard-kaprāwālā (red robed). The morning sun had been already up for three hours. The all-saffron column, three thousand strong, set itself in motion at the far western end of the fatal plain. Facing them, at the eastern end of it, stood a granite wall of scarlet coats with black leather belts, surmounted with blue turbans parted at the crown by red cox-combs, and fenced round by a glittering line of steel. The horsemen gathered speed; louder and clearer could be heard that roaring cry of “Hān! Hān! seize them! kill them!” the ground shook under the tramp of the cavalcade, as the flower of Rathor chivalry swept on nearer and nearer, their long red skirts fluttering and their red tasselled turbans dancing like a field of tulips in bloom when struck by a strong wind. Then De Boigne’s quick-firing brass guns vomitted fire, making woeful gaps in that dense crowd of horses and men. Of the three thousand brave men who had set out on that death-ride to save the honour of their clan, only one-third survived to reach the front of the campoo. And then the scarlet wall tipped with blue stirred; the French-led infantry, by their steady and well-directed platoon fire at such close range shot down the foremost Rathor desperadoes. The attacking line of horsemen was torn up by every successive volley. But the fury of the Rajput charge was not yet spent. Again and again, only ten or fifteen of their horsemen, regardless of their hopeless inferiority in number and arms, charged up to the bayonets till they were all laid low.
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A British officer of De Boigne gives an eye-witness's account of this charge:
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“It is impossible for me to describe the feats of bravery performed by the *Zard-kapra-walas* or forlorn hope of the enemy. I have seen, after their line was broken, fifteen or twenty men only return to charge one thousand infantry, and advance within ten or fifteen paces of our line, before they were all shot.” “It is but just to the enemy to acknowledge that, considering the situation in which they were found, and the disorder consequent thereto, they behaved very valiantly, as they actually cut down some of our people at their guns, and two of them with a desperate fury and intrepidity, made at De Boigne himself and might possibly have killed him if they had not been hewn in pieces by his body guard.”*
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∗ This officer was most probably Lewis Ferdinand Smith, who used to send valuable reports from De Boigne's camp to the Calcutta news-
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The last effort of Rajput valour was quenched in blood. All over that level plain leading up to the gates of Mertā, the yellow sand was littered with heaps of white-clad men, looking from a distance like shaken bundles of cotton cloth, with inert or writhing horses by their side. This scene was now variegated, as saffron robes, darkened with a warmer and more crimson fluid, mingled with the earlier white masses. Then Sindhia’s entire army advanced. The dispersed Maratha cavalry had by this time taken heart from the example of the campoo and forming up on the two wings and rear of the infantry, joined in the pursuit. There was none left to oppose them. The enemy’s guns and camp were captured by 10 o’clock in the morning, and the walled city of Mertā with all its stored wealth capitulated at 3 P.M., when De Boigne came up with his guns and threatened bombardment. The fort itself surrendered* four days later.
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The loss on the victorious side was heavy; it was mainly due to Captain Rohan’s reckless advance. Rohan himself, a Creole of the island of Bourbon, aged 61 years, with 40 years’ experience of Indian warfare, was shot through the thigh; he lingered till the 17th of September, when he died. Nine hundred of the disciplined infantry of De Boigne were killed or wounded. In the Maratha section of the army about 50 men were killed and 250 wounded,—their only officer casualties being Māloji Pinglé and Sukji Shindé killed and Shaikh Sharif wounded.
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The havoc in the Rajput ranks was appalling. Over two thousand of their men fell dead on the field and the wounded must have numbered at least another three
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papers,—the *Calcutta Gazette* (not yet an official paper), the *Bengal Journal*, the *India Gazette*, and the *Calcutta Chronicle*. The name Rohan has at places been misread as Bahor, and so printed.
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∗ During the battle Bhimrāj Bakhshi fled away to Nāgor with 4,000 Rathor horse, Gangārām Bhandāri who had hidden himself somewhere during the fighting, came out afterwards and arranged with De Boigne for the capitulation of Mertā fort, from which the 2,000 Rajputs who had entered it, were allowed to go away with their arms. [Chandra, ii. 81] De Boigne by his personal interposition, saved the large body of Rajputs who had fallen into his hands from being transfixed on the bayonets of some auxiliary Marathas. (*Calcutta Chronicle*, 1790). I have accepted the casualty list of the *Kalé Akhbārāt*.
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thousand. But mere numbers cannot truly indicate their loss. Not a house of note among the Rathor clan or their feudal retainers, but mourned the death of its head, and sometimes of the sons and nephews along with the head. Loyal retainers of lower rank lay clustering thick round the bodies of their chieftains or their chieftains' heirs, the foremost in the charge and the first to fall. The noblest among the noble slain were Mahesh-dās *Kumpū-ot* the chief of Āsop, and Shiv Singh *Chāmpā-ot* the chief of Auwā,—the latter being wounded all over his body and dying after a period of treatment. These had rallied the clansmen and led them on to a sure death after all had been lost save honour, and their official General Bhimrāj Singhavi had faltered.* The band of monks who bore the first brunt of De Boigne's attack, sacrificed 40 Rāmānandi *bhagats* and 50 Vishnuswāmi *bairāgis*. Muslim mercenaries (retainers of Ala Yār Beg and Shaikh Imām Ali) though in small numbers, also paid the price of their loyalty to their salt.
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The city of Mertā was plundered by the victors, though it did not yield so much booty as Patan. After three days, peace and security were re-established in the city. In one of its mosques opium worth Rs. 50,000 was found stored and it was confiscated.